Common Sense and Whiskey

Forgotten History

The RMS Titanic sank a hundred and one years ago today. Ships were dispatched from Halifax to recover bodies, since Halifax was the nearest big port with continental rail connections.

The Mackay-Bennet, a Halifax-based steamer normally used for laying communications cable, led the effort. Two days after the sinking she set out with a cargo of coffins and canvas bags, an undertaker and a preacher.

Over the next four weeks two ships from Halifax followed, the Minia and the CGS Montmagny. Altogether they and the SS Algerine, sailing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, recovered over three hundred bodies. Some were buried at sea, but 209 bodies returned to the Halifax shore.

Just 59 were sent away to their families. The rest, including the Titanic’s unidentifiable and unclaimed victims, were buried in Halifax, and local businesses donated bouquets of lilies.

•••••

An even more horrible tragedy still lay five years down the road. In 1917 Halifax harbor fell victim to the greatest conflagration of the Great War. I don't know if it's just me, but polling people I know, it sounds like nobody else knew about the largest man made explosion before Hiroshima, either.

 

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Halifax is a good-looking, purposeful, working town. With a population just under a million, it hosts 200,000 cruise ship passengers a year and some 40 percent of Canada’s defense assets. Nova Scotia is the world’s largest exporter of lobster and Christmas trees.

It doesn't look at all like a place afflicted. Perched on two rocky shores, Halifax and it's sister city Dartmouth, across the water, enjoy refuge from Atlantic storms, set back from the ocean. Still further back, the Bedford Basin affords a strategic ice-free port, invaluable in wartime.

With one of the world's deepest and most protected harbors, Halifax always prospered in wartime, from the Napoleanic wars and the War of 1812, and continuing to the onset of World War One, providing men and materiel for various war efforts.

Canada entered the Great War in 1914 as a colony, when Britain declared war on Germany. Canadians were just about unanimous in support. Halifax boomed, and harbor traffic ultimately rose to seventeen million tons a year, from just two.

By 1917, businesses were bursting. Industry struggled to keep up with demand. A quarter of the men in Halifax were serving overseas.

Foreshadowing the U.S. experience in World War Two, women took jobs formerly thought of as men's work. Ultimately, women's suffrage came to Canada in 1918, two years ahead of the United States.

The U.S. held to a position of neutrality. But after a German declaration of U-boat warfare against Atlantic supply lanes and the sinking of both merchant and passenger ships with Americans onboard, the U.S joined the Great War in April 1917.

The first regular, systematic convoy of war material from Canada left Sydney, Nova Scotia’s easternmost harbor, on June 24th, 1917. By October as many as 36 supply ships were assembled for each convoy.

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax describes a typical convoy as five ships abreast with two corvettes out front and one on each flank.

Typically, freighters with deck cargo of tanks, trucks and tankers, other freighters with aircraft, and maybe a heavy lift ship with locomotives sailed alongside rescue ships and an oiler with fuel for the corvettes. A destroyer carrying the escort force commander brought up the rear.

Convoy traffic moved to Halifax from Sydney during winter, owing to the back bay, the ice-free Bedford Basin. The basin, with a surface area of just six and a half square miles, was jammed with ships.

•••••

By winter 1917 a jittery uncertainty had prevailed across the twin cities for months. The Canadians dragged submarine nets across the harbor each night to prevent German U-boats from sneaking in.

Just Passing Through

12 March 2013, London Heathrow to Istanbul Ataturk: Looks like we’ll run due southeast this morning, generally above Luxembourg, Stuttgart and Munich. Then we’ll cross the Alps between Innsbruck and Salzburg - the Tyrol - approaching the Balkans over Zagreb, then Belgrade, then just north of Sofia (“Bulgaristan” where we’re headed) and into Istanbul.

Before Europe was “united,” as recently as the early 90’s, only half of this route would have been over friendly territory. The line came down between Vienna and the omnious land of Marshall Tito and the Yugo (we snickered at the Yugo), beginning on 2013’s map with lovely little Slovenia. It would have become only more ominous as we’d pass over Bulgaria, known only back then for it’s relentless tractor production and it’s shot-putting female Olympians.

•••••

We’ve just left a country in the doldrums, and freezing. The state of British politics is irritable and downcast, among both rulers and ruled.

And last night perhaps hundreds of people spent the night on motorways, trapped in their cars in part of a winter-long progression of snowstorms. Cold, as low as minus eight across the south, at a point on the calendar when daffodils are expected, or at least hoped for.

You can walk around London anytime but it’s not often you can walk around London in a miserable and furious snow flurry, and so yesterday I layered up and walked along the south bank of the river, tourist traffic (like me) down but still present, even the barge traffic muted by the snow. The world closed in.

•••••

The British economy is stagnant and the same debate that wearies you here, wearies you there. Living standards are not expected to exceed pre-crash levels for ten years. Banks are themselves on the dole and still lend less than before, for lack of business demand. The number of small businesses borrowing this year is forecast to be down from 23 to 20 per cent.

And the queen is sick. At 86, a stomach bug keeps even a monarch down longer than one would like. After a week’s hiatus, her Majesty demurred on returning to the public eye yesterday, apparently judging that a church service in drafty old Westminster Abbey wasn’t in one’s best interest.

Still, get any ten million people in one place at one time and a fine time may be had, and  we had one. I have a new favorite British bookstore, besides the Waterstone’s in Oxford, home to all the world’s textbooks. This one is called Daunt Books, in the Marylebone High Street. At Daunt, books are arranged by the countries of the world.

Montreal to Halifax on ViaRail's The Ocean

 

The Ocean, service from Montreal to Halifax.

 

Just about to get started on the train from Montreal to Halifax, six-days-a-week service that will be unceremoniously cut to three at the end of October, a decision by fiat of the dictatorial, supra-parliamentary Stephen Harper conservative government, according to one of our fellow travelers. They’ve branded this service The Ocean, with a logo of a famous lighthouse.

Here in the ViaRail Montreal terminal they're queueing by the down escalator with the Halifax sign. An overweight man in a dirty orange T-shirt drops his Hello Kitty paraphenalia around him and settles in. Very odd. There is a queue of twenty or so, including one nun. We're across the way at a café. Two fat women are enjoying poutine, a dish with French Canadian origins comprising french fries, cheese and gravy.

As poutine has spread across Canada and come into its own, variants have popped up, like Mexican poutine, with jalapenos. These ladies sure were enjoying theirs, and the full-sugar version of Pepsi.

In Halifax there’s a lobster poutine, an egregious use of lobster. For $14, The Hart and Thistle offers Lobster Poutine Nova Scotia: Lobster morsels, cheese curds and lobster bisque topped with bernaise. Over fries.

A couple of days in the capital of Quebec suggest an obesity problem, if not the obesity epidemic in the U.S. Perhaps poutine is related?

By the late date when I set out to reserve a train compartment, the sleepers which included restaurant food were sold out so we've ended up in the most expensive accommodation, a large room with two beds located in the observation car at the back of the train. When I suggested that we'd thrown as much money at ViaRail as we could, the nice lady in the check-in Panorama Lounge (I think anybody who wanted to could use the Panorama Lounge) looked at the ticket and said "Yes you have."

Vignette: Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

Cameron Highlands is a temperate hill station about halfway up the otherwise blistering Malaysian peninsula. Bill Cameron was a surveyor, working for the British government in 1885. Just 125 years ago, these highlands were being mapped for the first time. (Photos from Malaysia)

About five or eight of us jumped off the train at Tapah Road, Malaysia, on schedule at 9:51. Ten minutes later a taxi rolled up and we piled in, Mirja and Peter and me. 

Peter's an Aussie who runs transport for a coal mine in Indonesian Borneo. Like us, he was headed up here with just a vague idea why. He had to be in Singapore on the fourth. We had to be in Bangkok next week.

We agreed on the ringgits (Malaysian money) for the load of us and drove into town, where we swapped drivers and climbed into a beige, pre-war Mercedes. Our new driver was ancient, gnarled. He laid his safety belt over his lap, but he wouldn't attach it.

Every four minutes he'd dredge phlegm from deep on the bottom of his lungs with a low, two step wheeze. He had a lump the size of half a cue ball on top of his old bald head.

•••••

On the road up into the hills, the only suggestion of commerce was a series of untended bamboo poles. Durians dangled from some.

Most of the time the old man was generally in the correct lane, and he never overtook a bus, though not for lack of trying. He got to fourth gear fast as he could and slowly accelerated up the switchbacks. But somewhere along the way he got fire in his belly and drove like a bat outta hell the rest of the way.

Grasshoppers and Spiders and Africa, Oh My

Working on a new e-book about the African safari experience has got me poking around into my photos from Africa. Here's one I reprocessed yesterday. It's a huge, finger-sized grasshopper from South Africa. Click it to make it bigger.

And while we're in safari mode, here's a random, short bit from the upcoming e-book. It's from a walking safari in Zambia:

Rains from November to April flood the Luangwa river system, and from then until November it's perfectly dry. The water will dry and recede and force the animals into greater and greater concentrations, with more and more conflict and danger from predators, but for now, there is peace, there are lagoons for crocs to eat catfish and places for hippos to eat and live apart from the river. The grass is still green and tall and thick, and Aubrey shows us how hippos change the landscape as they come and go from the river, creating an indentation on the water's edge that grows when it rains, collapsing the soil into gullies and washing it into the river.

Other animals use the trampled paths, that extend far up onto land, and sometimes hippo trails even evolve into rivers. We set out away from the river on a hippo path old and wide enough that there's a sandy bottom maybe half a meter wide with the grass on either side. Can't see ahead of us or to either side beyond the grass and Isaac pushes on toward a stand of mopane trees.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Paraguay, Chapter Twelve

Here is Chapter Twelve of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We're publishing each chapter here on the blog (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book at Amazon.com, at BN.com, or direct from EarthPhotos Publishing. Here's the Kindle version (just $6.99). Click these photos to make them bigger. More photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Paraguay Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

12 PARAGUAY


The farthest back water washes to a national capital must be Asuncion, Paraguay. It’s as if its residents didn’t ask for the honor, but the capital had to be somewhere so they amiably accommodated.

Maybe parts of Africa are less vital. Think Ouagadougou, maybe, or Bangui. Even somnambulant Vientiane, which is in Laos, shows more vitality than here, smack in the middle of South America.

They’d rolled up the streets by the time we installed ourselves in the Sabe Hotel. The front desk spoke not so much as “hello.” No English. Here in the national capital.

The TV wouldn’t work until tomorrow because it was New Years Day and they couldn’t get anybody out to fix it, but it was a nice enough place. A picture hung partly over the window in the hallway. That was a little strange.

I was out early in the morning, through the business district and down to the Paraguay River. It wasn’t very big, downtown Asuncion, and it wasn’t very busy.

There was the main Plaza de los Heroes, down a few blocks, and Asuncion had a building modeled after the Pantheon. Sales ladies’ tables along Avenue Palma offered up the usual languid market fare: watches and underwear and (allegedly) Nike clothes and plastic toys. Birds were loud and it was hot hot hot by 8:45.

Down at the river, General Francisco Solana Lopez’s white-washed mansion, started in 1860, stood shuttered. Beyond it, children pumped water at a clutter of squatter shacks. A sand spit stretched out to two rusting shipwrecks, resting over on their sides, just on the edge of the water. Here in the national capital.

The breathtaking Asuncion waterfront.

But let’s start at the beginning, which was a few days earlier.

The Allure of the Far Away and Exotic

Here's a ruse we hadn't seen: The local boys use signs with people's names to get access inside the pass control gates, then they make like officials who are going to open up another pass control lane for you, grab your passports and expedite you through the lines, with the acquiescence of the real pass control clerks, for tips.

They're on you like a glove until you tip them, at which point they're joined by the baggage cart cadres just outside the pass control desk. These guys artfully monopolize all the available baggage carts and attach themselves to each arrival.

The pass control expediter got a dollar though he demanded ten. At least his scam was novel. Plus, we kind of needed our passports.

But we'd been through the baggage cart game quite enough on this trip to Africa, thank you, and we simply told the little round fellow who appointed us his (thank goodness we knew enough French), "We don't want your help, we will not pay you, go away," and he smiled and laughed and thought it was all a big joke and didn't begin to move until I rested my hand on his shoulder and repeated the same words slowly and more gravely. Finally he shook his head at the terrible wrong to which he'd fallen miserable victim and slowly walked away, but he was back at the curb for one last try.

Welcome to Abidjan.

- Tuesday, 21 March, 1995, from the collected dairies.

Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

Eid al-Adha: A Guest Post

Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, is celebrated annually on the 10th day of the 12th and the last Islamic month of Dhu-al Hijjah. Use of the lunar calendar explains why the date drifts each year by 11 or 12 days. 

This year's festival was celebrated yesterday. A year ago, my friends Bobby and Carol Long took part in the festival in Morocco, and Bob has contributed this guest post:

•••••

We were in Morocco for last year's feast, and it was an extraordinary experience. Hamid, our driver and guide, arraigned for us to dine at his aunt's house. We were a bit nervous, being last minute guests, but Carol bought a nice gift of sweets that really broke the ice. It was a walk up apartment with a well worn kitchen and a water closet that you could find with your nose. They had a rooftop terrace that was serving as an abattoir and kitchen for the event. There were four slaughtered sheep and a very agitated live one. I felt sorry for it.

We entered the public room which was rectangular in the Arab style, with seating on the three walls. Hamid's 92 year old grandfather held court in the place of honor, where he would recline from time to time. The women sat on one side of the room and the men on the other. Hamid served as translator.

The kids wasted no time sitting around me and asking me my name. Bobby is always pronounce Bo-Be outside of the US, so I pointed to myself and said, "Ali Baba", much to their delight. We tried out our French, Spanish and Berber for everyone's amusement. The ladies then returned to the roof and Carol went with them. I watched Hamid's uncle preparing kababs of something I was unfamiliar with. I inquired and was promptly handed a piece of boiled sheep's liver. It was a good thing I like liver. He was placing thin strips of sheep's fat around the skewers of sheep's liver. (You can see it in the attached picture) From time to time, a pretty young Berber teen would come through the room bearing a skewer of grilled lamb, and we would each take a piece. It was the best lamb I've ever had.

I walked up to the roof to watch the proceedings, and Carol said that Hamid's aunt wanted a picture of the two of them. So, I headed down to the car with the kids in tow. I decided to use my point and shoot, so as to be somewhat discreet. I turned to take a picture of the children, only to find that I had a dead battery. I said, "Un momento", and turned around to grab the Nikon with the big, wide angle lens. The kids squealed with surprise when I turned around with that rig. I've attached the two pictures I took. You'll note the tiny grill being used to feed a houseful of hungry guests.

Soon the ladies retired to their dining area and us men got to feasting. Skewer after skewer of lamb was served, followed by a large plate of lamb shank and flat bread to eat it with. I made a point of sitting on my left hand, so as not to give offense. I heard, "Eat, don't be shy" until I was about to burst. Hamid's grandfather used sign language to make sure his honored guest was having a good time.

We were on a schedule, so too soon, it was time to leave. I practically had to drag Carol away from the ladies. Language barrier be damned, they were all having a very good time. It was an experience that you can't buy, and one we will never forget. I imagine we were mentioned during Sunday's feast. Wish we could have been there for it.

There is a whole world of decent, god fearing people out there that Americans know nothing about. I'm happy that I can now claim to be a bit less ignorant of it.

- Bobby Long, November 2012

Photos from the author

Fun for Frogs in Fiji

The first we heard of a cyclone was Monday afternoon in Port Vila, Vanuatu. We sat, pouring sweat, at a terrace on the only proper street, trying to lunch on burger and beer, but ultimately deconstructing a thing on a bun that started with the kitchen sink and then added beets, onions, carrots, eggs, bacon, cucumber, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, salt, pepper, chillies, ketchup - and maybe a tiny little speck of free-range, no insecticide Vanuatu beef. In there somewhere.

Next table over a bright pink, corpulent fellow told his ni-Vanuatu lunch mate "Bluh bluh rain, bluh bluh cyclone bluh Fiji."

I leaned out from behind my mound of discarded non-burger and inquired.

"Yeah," he said, "It's southeast of here toward Fiji. We just had a look at it on the internet and it's a big mean thing. It's what's been causing all the rain."

Since we were bound for Fiji in 18 hours this was notable, although just then it was sunny, hot and about 600 per cent humid in Vila. We were just in from Espiratu Santo, another island in the Vanuatu archipelago where we'd passed endless sunny days in relentless, blistering sun.

But in the taxi home we heard the cyclone warnings in three languages on Vanuatu's only AM radio station, with a particular warning for the southeast island group centered around the cult-and-volcano island of Tanna. By now the cyclone had a name. May I introduce you to Jo.

Pretty Far Off the Map in the South Pacific

This week, a couple of quick little impressions about flying in and around the Vanuatu archipelago - Here's one, another in a day or so. Pictured here is an outrigger off Espiritu Santo Island, Vanuatu, and there are a few more photos in the Vanuatu Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

The Vanuatu domestic flight terminal is like the one in Nepal, and probably a dozen others we haven't seen yet. If you're a desperately underperforming, poor country in the first place, your inclination is to spend your tiny wad on the international terminal for transits and arrivals, your countrymen and the hardy few who venture by plane beyond the gateway be damned.

It's just the way it is.

Our flight from the capital to Espiritu Santo island this morning would stop at Craig's Cove, Ambrym Island. I broke out my map of Vanuatu and found two airport symbols on Ambyrm Island. Which would it be, I asked at the check-in desk.

Blank looks. Much consultation. Studying the maps. Asking the boy in the back, the baggage boy.

No one knew, but eventually I found it, a light blue marking of a physical landmark, not a town, and that brought grateful smiles from the check-in boy.

The door to domestic departures spoke three languages - English, French and Bislama. Respectively, it read: Passengers Only, Reservées aux Passagers, Pasensa No Mo. We filed in.

Guatemala Shoeshine - Wednesday HDR

This week's photo is from a May, 2010 visit to Guatemala. This shoe shine man sits on the main square in Antigua, Guatemala. Click the photo for a much bigger version.

We intended a peaceful weekend at Lake Atitlan, but a few hours after our arrival Volcan Pacaya erupted, closing the airport, then we were hit by tropical storm Agatha and had to flee first Lake Atitlan then Guatemala, where the airport remained closed, for a ride home from El Salvador.

Here's what happened: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. There are photos of the experience in the Guatemala Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

And here are three hundred-odd photos in the HDR Gallery.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - The Trans-Siberian Railroad, Chapter Five

 

Here is Chapter Five of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the summer (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. Photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Russia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

5 THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY

If you don't speak Russian and if you decode Cyrillic gingerly, one letter at a time, it’s not completely effortless to come up with bottled water in Ekaterinburg, but it is possible, and I bought six litres.

The kiosk, alongside a tram stop, was just big enough to be a walk-in affair, not big enough for four, let alone our steamy tensome.  The boys in front  argued over what beer and candy to order one each of. I motioned for six bottles way up high on a shelf  and all kinds of consternation rippled through the mottled impatience behind me.

In a few hours Mirja and I would be climbing aboard the Trans-Siberian railroad to Ulan Bataar, Mongolia.  We’d be a week en route, so we needed all kinds of stuff.

As soon as I had all those bottles, though, I calculated we could get everything else at the train station.  Six litres of water is heavy.

Today was Labor Day in the U.S. On the edge of Siberia, autumn held full sway. E-kat's denizens plodded by cold and damp in an insistent, heavy shower. A lot of the older folks wore long coats. All day the rain beset.

•••••

Every account of coming upon the Ural mountains speaks of disappointment, and for good reason. The dividing line between Europe and Asia is just hills, really, and Ekaterinburg nestles just beyond their eastern slopes.

The Atrium Palace Hotel Ekaterinburg looked so nice on the internet that we mused back home that it had to be either German or mafia owned. Well, it wasn’t German. It was E-kat’s only “5-star,” with glass elevators and snuggly, fluffy Scandinavian bedding and BBC World on TV.

Still, it had its Russian characteristics: There was the hourly rate, Rule #2: “If you stay for less than six hours, you are charged for twelve hour accommodation.” And Rule #7: “The guests who troubled a lot before can not be allowed to stay at the hotel.” Hard to know if the guys in track suits grouped around the lobby drinking coffee were part of the problem or there to enforce the solution.

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Bhutan, Chapter Four

Here is Chapter Four of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the summer (Track down previous chapters here). You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. Photos and additional commentary are available at A Common Sense and Whiskey Companion. And here's the Bhutan Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

4 BHUTAN

Only about thirty of us were flying to Bhutan, so the back of the plane held cargo: a couple of computers strapped to the seats, a boom box, a crock pot, several unmarked boxes, a quilt. And in the back seat a flight attendant drank in sleep - I mean, she snored. She, Mirja and one more were the only women.

The river Brahmaputra wound out toward the Ganges near Dhaka. Sunlight glinted and skipped across tens of thousands of acres of flooded rice paddies, miles and miles north of the Bay of Bengal. Sometimes the clouds lifted over northern Burma and Bangladesh.

Four hundred miles north of Rangoon a bend in the river ate half a town. It was July 4th. Americans celebrated independence while South Asia grappled with the monsoon.

When time came to drop through the clouds into Bhutan, the pilot announced, "We will maneuver the aircraft in the valley. This is a little different from large commercial aircraft. It is standard procedure. You will see the houses and trees a little closer than you are used to. The scenery is beautiful. Please enjoy the ride."

He just picked a hole in the clouds and dove through. He did a 180 into the Paro valley. The automatic sensors called out, "too low," and for the record he kept repeating, "acknowledge, override," into the cockpit recorder.

This was George, bluff, barrel-chested, a real dude with a wide gray mustache, and one of just fourteen people ever to fly for Royal Bhutan Airlines, aka Druk Air. We said we'd buy him a beer if we saw him in town and he told us he'd drink it.

The only airport in Bhutan is in Paro, an old west one-horse town spread three hundred feet, and no more, across the valley floor, hardly movin' in the midday sun. Uniformed Indian soldiers lolled about drinking "Thums Up" brand cola.

•••••

Phruba and Jigme, our guide and driver for the week, gathered us up for the trip to Thimpu, the capital and main city. Irrigated rice grew just about before your eyes, and every river was a tumult.

We crept and powered around corners (all week) in a Toyota Yokohama van. Jigme and Phruba both wore traditional skirt-like wraps called ghos, a lot like Burmese longyis (chapter six). Phruba’s legs stuck out below the knee. All week long he sat in the passenger seat, the picture of Buddhism, calm, legs hairy and hands clasped.

Tall and 28, he used to play basketball with the young King.

"We would stay outside and pick teams," Phruba told us. "When he was in a good mood the King would invite us in to play. When he was in a bad mood he would play with his bodyguards. He is very good at the three point shot."

Being taller than the King sets up a sensitive question: Does one shoot over the King’s head? Yes. The King's bodyguards are some of the biggest men in the country, Phruba said, so he reckoned the King was used to it.

•••••

"Phruba, is the King married?" Mirja wanted to know.

"Yes, he has four Queens" Phruba replied, and seeing an eyebrow cock, he tried to put that right by adding what must have seemed the obvious: "But they are all sisters."

Common Sense and Whiskey on the Radio

Here's excerpts from today's radio interview about Common Sense and Whiskey, the book, on WUTC Chattanooga. Many thanks to the interviewer, Michael Edward Miller. Click to play the mp3.

Common Sense And Whiskey Radio Interview     

 

Vignettes from Africa IV - Day Trip to Zambia

ZNBC, Zambian TV was just a scream. At sign on at 6:00 p.m., Chinyama Mukuma, in a brown plaid jacket, and Bridget Nkhoma, brown blazer and a necklace with a cross, read us the news. It ran until they’d told it all, I guess. It started at 6:00 and ended at 6:18. Then some happy people down by a pool smiled and sang about how much they enjoyed "Saladi De-odorized Vegetable Oil." The next commercial was for the Gorilla, the Zambian equivalent of The Club anti-theft device.

The TV played videos on channel 4. They even played the warning against showing them in places like hotels.

•••••

We gambled. Three games available down at the casino, roulette, blackjack and Zambesi Poker - five card draw with no drawing. You just bet your hand. Mirja and I bought 100 Z$2 chips each and pulled up at the roulette table. Every single croupier was a trainee, and the trainer glared at all of them, all the time. I lost all my money straightaway but Mirja won about all of it back, and still we were in bed by 11:00.

•••••

While the sun rose over Zambia, white people disdained me over their cereals and fruit as I stuffed down sausages, bacon and cheese rolls. We changed hotels. Graceful, gracious, the Victoria Falls Hotel has a fine view over the fine back lawn, up the chasm of the Zambesi to the Zambia bridge and the falls' spray. Water costs more than beer.

•••••

The air parched, still, searing, we set out to walk to Zambia.

Vignettes from Africa III - Up to Victoria Falls

There's a band of five boys under a tree, all five playing xylophone-marimba-type things, their hands full of musical hammers, and a lot of smiling going on. Now there's more cumulus than blue and maybe, just maybe, rain will come. They need it keenly.

I asked a young boy, "How are you doing?"

"I am just waiting for rain, sir."

•••••

If there were no Victoria Falls here there sure wouldn't be any tourists. Flat, scrubby, hot-as-absolute-hell. Air completely still.

The instant we got to town Mirja and I did the walk down to the falls, in heavy travel mode, long sleeves and pants and all. What the hell?

We walked probably eight or nine minutes past salesmen (carved rhinos, hippos) and across the rail line that continues into Zambia. U.S. $2.50 admission was good for the day. Signs admonished you to keep strictly to the paths. In just a couple minutes, you were there.

It's hard to choose the right superlatives.

Some figures: It's seasonal, but at its peak, 12,000,000 gallons take the plunge every minute. 1,600 meters is a mile. Victoria Falls is 1691 meters wide.

It's carved from a shelf of volcanic basalt, chiseling zig zag down a fault line. It's been only 140 years - 1855 - since the first white man, David Livingstone, arrived. Grass-clad tribesmen told him of Mosi-oa-Tunya, but he named it for his queen back home. In 1905, exactly 50 years later, a rail line arrived from Cape Town on its way to Cairo. The bridge to Zambia began. By this time Cecil Rhodes was in charge, and Zambia was North Rhodesia.

We didn't care about any of that. We just lurched straight down to stand in the spray. Someone outside warned, "Oh, definitely rent a rain coat - you'll get drenched," and we did get drenched, without raincoats, and it was fabulous.

•••••

Victoria Falls has no parking lots, no dancing waters, no wax museums. Just stone pathways. We wandered the paths around the falls, through the fig and rhododendron trees. Two does teased us for awhile, and on the path back we squatted down to visit with a pack of about 20 curious suricates, sitting up on their hind legs, watching for danger, or maybe a dinner tidbit from the tourists.

At the end of the day  the spray tossed far up over the trees and the bridge to Zambia. The sky deepened pink into blue and black, and the southern cross pierced the black high and to the south. On the menu at the rooftop restaurant, crocodile thermidor for Z$45: "Enjoy a crock-tail with us."

Next: Day trip to Zambia

Vignettes from Africa II - Flying to Zimbabwe

Six-Thirty a.m., Kenyatta Avenue and Kimathi Street, Nairobi. Standing on the corner, waiting for a ride. The clouds were underlit by the rising sun, peach and blue. We were headed for Harare.

This was way back, 1995, before the world decided Robert Mugabe was a monster, and we though  “Ahh, Zimbabwe...the land of Bobby Mugabe.... Officially, His Excellency the Honorable President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, CDE Robert Gabriel Mugabe.

The "Sunshine City" lived up to its name...brilliant sun, no humidity - clear, crisp light. Harare perched atop the highveld, twelve or 1500 meters above sea level. We were speaking Shona now - thank you was datenda, beer was wa wa.

As we flew in, cumulus puffs played shadows across agricultural heartland. Occasional hillocks. The main crops were tobacco and maize, but there was also wheat, cotton, citrus, diary and what they call "commercial wildlife production."

The altitudes moderated the tropical temperatures. A perfect climate, and at only 650,000 people, a manageable size, with gracious wide boulevards, a compact center and prim, polite suburbs where properties were trimmed with hedges. It looked like Schaumberg, Illinois, or maybe a suburb of St. Louis.

We had business. We needed airline tickets to Victoria Falls. We needed a hotel there, to find the American Express office to buy money, and film. We took a room at the venerable Miekles (say nickels with an m) Hotel.

How else to start such a busy business day? We sampled the local beer at the Miekles bar. Listening to the Out of Africa soundtrack CD at the wood and wicker bar with Zambesi beers might sound hackneyed if you're used to it, but we weren't.

By three we had cash, film, air tickets and a room in Victoria Falls for tomorrow.

Because of the wide boulevards Harare didn't feel close and busy like Nairobi. But then, at 650,000 versus 2,000,000, Harare wasn’t as close and busy as Nairobi.

Department stores - Barbour's and Truworth's and Greaterman's. Between two extended stays in the bush, we went wild. The personal care section - Shield Zimbabwe deodorant. Some hair care product licensed by Clairol out of Johannesburg. Glent Lotion ("An American formula"). Preen soap.

Brentoni Italy expensive boutique. "American Express Cards Welcome" all over town. No begging except a few kids along the First Avenue pedestrian mall - and a policeman shooed them away. Some of these people did the shorts and high socks, Bermuda-style routine. It looked no less silly here. Trash cans to keep the streets clean. Smiling people. Good climate. Livable.

A (metered) taxi driver asked if it was our first time in Zimbabwe. I said yeah but don't drive us around aimlessly to run up the meter on account of that. He turned. "No, I would not. That would be stealing."

Kenya had had independence since 1962, Zimbabwe since 1980. Depending on how you looked at it, Kenya had more time to build infrastructure - or Zimbabwe had less time to let it fall in. The land of Cecil Rhodes was well built by the Brits and turned over in good shape when Rhodesia became Zimbabwe.

•••••

Dinner wasn't very good. "Roots of Africa" boasted authentic local food. It couldn't've been served by a nicer, more smiling group of people. The setting was thatch and bamboo and traditional African print patterned tablecloths, open air with the grill visible through glass, out on the edge of downtown (Seventh Avenue). Chaka Khan on the juke.

But the food just didn't cut it. On the menu: matumbu (intestine), green grams (green bananas), sadza (thick porridge), rape and dovi (peanut butter). We both tried mokimo, a mash of potato, maize and beans, pry-your-lips-apart dry. Chicken stew, third world all the way, dark meat with a bone in every bite!

The most remarkable thing about Roots of Africa restaurant was their one, single, By God Urinal - a chest-high double-wide metal monolith.

Okay - maybe not a lot was happening in Harare back then. But Africa Unity Square was a sweet little green space between the parliament and the Anglican cathedral where they took Polaroids of rural folks who didn’t have cameras, standing and grinning by the fountain. It might not have been hip but it was gracious and it was sweet and I'd rather have been there than in Moi's Kenya.

Next: Up to Victoria Falls

Vignettes from Africa I - Driving to Nairobi

Here's a short series to be posted over several days, random short experiences in Africa. Not necessarily in any order, just observations collected over time.

Two hours 25 minutes beyond the lip of the Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania, we found a tarmac road. Open-backed, full-polluting Tatas tore across the flats outside town.

The run-up to Arusha was shady, tree lined, graceful. Then after the coffee plantations, ramshackle stalls like "Lucky Feed M ill." "Lucky Family General Store." "Moona Pharmacy." ("Moona is an obscenity in Finnish) "Beuty Saloon."

We got a driver in Arusha named Moses, and he said we'd make Nairobi by 4:00. Arusha called itself the halfway point between Cairo and the Cape. Maybe so, but I wondered, so what?

A few years ago a United Nations conference was postponed here because a snake fried the wiring of the Arusha International Conference Center. Made it too hot to use.

Over at the Mount Meru Hotel they’d be happy to arrange tickets for you on Air Burundi or Sudan Airways - whichever you’d like.

Moses stopped in at a little bar he knew for us to change the rest of our Tanzanian shillings into four Tusker premiums, and we sure did roll into Nairobi right at 4:00.

•••••

The most delicious thing in Nairobi was a three-day-old newspaper. It was nine days since we'd seen one. Walking back from the newsstand, a fight broke out right in the middle of Kenyatta Avenue. We stepped around the pile of people and settled into the ex-pat bar at the New Stanley Hotel, called the Thorn Tree.

Several cold Premium beers later, Maurice, a man from United Touring Company, came stridin’ in like the guy in those Keep On Truckin’ cartoons to settle a debt, clutching a one hundred dollar bill and a five.

Caught up, Premium braced and a hundred bucks richer, we felt like stepping out. They tell you not to brave the Nairobi streets at night. But the cabs wanted five bucks for two blocks’ walk, so we said screw 'em, and we walked to a place called Trattoria for Italian dinner, and then walked back. Most of the people on the streets were security men with clubs.

Next: Flying to Zimbabwe

Common Sense and Whiskey, the Book - Chapter Two

Here is Chapter two of Common Sense and Whiskey, the book. We'll publish each chapter over the course of the summer. You can order the entire book direct from EarthPhotos Publishing, or at Amazon.com. The accompanying photos, and additional commentary are available at The Common Sense and Whiskey Companion.

 

2 GREENLAND

You know those gauzy coffee commercials where cozy people savor their morning brew, steam rising in circles from the cup? In the midst of a scene like that, cradling our cups in our hands in Silva’s kitchen, with a great low rumble an iceberg broke apart just offshore from Ataa camp, Greenland.

Boulders of ice plunged into waves around the berg, now off balance, as it rocked side to side in slow motion. Silva stoked the commotion, cursing and scurrying for his video camera (he did this more than once). He was sure someday he’d be in National Geographic.

•••••

Silva ran the Ataa Holiday Camp. The tourist service down the coast in Ilulissat cheerfully recommended it, because Silva was a Man Of Some Repute in Ilulissat.

He was in year eighteen in Greenland, first as an itinerant musician from Denmark, invited up here to play hotels for a month, then three, then a year and one thing led to the next. Now he ran Travel Nature Touring Company and he was having a go at redeveloping this abandoned trading post into a tourist camp.

In 1915 Ataa boasted 59 residents: 58 Inuit and the station chief, the only Dane. They lived in six houses and three tents, with a school, the manager’s house, a workshop and a storehouse for seal blubber.

Seal hunting kept Ataa alive, and that year they collected 137 barrels of seal blubber, 42 barrels of shark liver, five blue and eleven white fox skins, 70 seal skins, eight and a quarter kilos of tusks and four and a half kilos of eider down.

Nobody lives there full time now. The nearest settlement today is at a place called Qertaq, thirty kilometers away.

Ataa camp sits at the base of ancient, rounded low hills of less than 1000 meters, Precambrian gneisses finally exposed only 7000 or 8000 years ago, when the ice cap most recently melted away. Ataa means “its lower part” - the base of the hills.

My wife Mirja (it’s Finnish, pronounced “Mir - ya,” sort of) and I got there by speedboat. A Quicksilver 3000 Classic bounced us across choppy water, under mean, lowering gray, 70 kilometers from Ilulissat to Ataa. Its pilot, Jergen, with his broad, expansive head, buzz cut and ready smile, was Greenland Man.

The wind kicked up. We spied the spray of a finback whale, spun around and saw him dive, and in the spinning spotted a seal.

Jergen pounded the Quicksilver’s butt into the tiny harbor at Ataa, where Silva bobbed aboard a Zodiac, perched uncertainly and growling. He wore the only clothes we ever saw him in, Nikes and a running suit.

Welcome to Ataa Holiday Camp.

Silva’s own hand, improbably, built the yellow plyboard breakfast and general headquarters shack where we warmed up over coffee. It perched on rocks some few meters from freezing, lapping water.

His sister Lilliana and her husband Filita were visiting from Florence, original Home of All Culture, and I suspect just maybe they considered Silva a bloody wide open, straight ahead idjit.

Loud and fifty, soft-hearted, quick to take a stand and quick to back away from it, Silva, with an impossibly full graying mustache and tousled hair, was a real piece of work, with eight bambinos - four in Italia and four in Ilulissat.

Silva shuffled across the kitchen, singing, whistling, posing, acting like supervising his sister Lilliana, who did all the cooking. What would he do when she went home to Italy?

Silva got caught up in the drama of the changing weather. We’d been there half an hour. Eyes widening, palms spread wide, he told us, “We cannot risk our lives to take you back if the weather is worse tomorrow!”

We sipped our coffee and watched him realize that since we’d just arrived he might be getting off on the wrong foot. He retreated behind his hand and allowed as how on the other hand his sister had to fly to Denmark on the same flight as us. When you can sit and watch a man think, his is a disarming guilelessness.

Of Dams and Ecosystems - and Wednesday HDRs

Conflicting stories about a dam across the Mekong: On Monday the Vancouver Sun ran the story Laos agrees to delay dam that neighbours say threatens Mekong. From a story today via Vietnamnet, "Thailand’s second largest contractor is pushing ahead with the controversial Xayaburi dam in Laos despite concerns voiced by environmental activists."

Can't claim to be an expert on Laotian hydroelectric needs or possible ramifications in the Mekong Delta, but having visited both the general area of the dam and the Delta, I can say both are lovely and unique and you'd hate to see the character of either change.

Here's the Mekong upstream from Luang Prabang, Laos. Entirely pristine:

And from farther south at the Mekong Delta below Saigon, here are this week's Wednesday HDRs, a couple of photos from Can Tho, Vietnam's eighth largest city. First from the really big floating market, then a textured photo of the terrace at the Victoria Can Tho Hotel:

Both HDRs shot with Nikon D-200, processed in Photomatix Pro and finished in Photoshop CS4.

All these photos click through to larger versions on EarthPhotos.com. Check out the Vietnam Gallery and Laos Gallery there for more. And there are over 300 photos in the HDR Gallery.

And while we're on the subject, read an excerpt from our story Hurtling Through the Mekong Delta.